Artist and Web Developer

I am an artist and web developer living in beautiful Butte, Montana. I grew up in Missoula and graduated from the University of Montana with a BFA in painting and a minor in Media Arts. Shortly after I moved to Boise Idaho where my husband attended grad school at Boise State for Creative Writing. 10 years later we returned to Montana.

Artist Statement

My artwork combines identifiable, organic shapes and unrecognizable forms in vibrant large scale paintings and intimate works on paper. Although my subjects range from anatomy to self-portraits to cityscapes, my work consistently reveals the inner and underlying structure of things. I often collaborate on projects with my husband, the poet Adrian Kien.

Web Development

I started building websites in 2003. It was amazing to me that you only needed a text editor. And a book about HTML. From there I added to my skills learning ActionScript and reading Javascript: the Definitive Guide. Then came the jQuery revolution. And then Backbone.js, HTML Canvas, Angular, React, React Native, on and on.

Currently, I am a senior web developer and work with the good people at Foster Made. Web development is a profession for self-taught, independent thinkers and I am proud to be a part of it.

Colophon

The evolution of this website tracks with the evolution of the internet. The first iteration was published in 2003. I wrote an HTML page for each artwork (without even a PHP include) and styled it with CSS. Then I looked at it in Internet Explorer and the CSS the layout was messed up. So I rebuilt it using tables 😢 For the next iteration I built a custom artwork management system in Ruby on Rails. That site used Bootstrap and Coffeescript and was deployed on Heroku. Now this website is built with Gatsby.js, React, and Tailwind CSS. It's powered by Contentful and deployed with Netlify. What a long strange trip. And on and on.